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Patricia Ramsey
- The University Press of Kentucky
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779 Patricia Ramsey “Harlan County Cat” Patricia Ramsey is a native of Barbourville and grew up among Elizabethan ballads and folklore transplanted to Appalachia. She has taught in the public schools of Jefferson County, served as a counselor at Indiana University Southeast, and been a poetry therapist at the Southern Indiana Mental Health and Guidance Center in Jeffersonville. She is also a playwright and has won several prestigious awards with her play about coal mining in eastern Kentucky, A Killin’. In this poem she returns to her native mountains to take a stand against the giant, destructive “cats” that eat up the hills. h In the early morning when mists hang wet spiderwebs in hollows of dead leaves, wind sings under and through rock cliffs where ancient seas once raged, the unmoccasined coon and badger cross and recross the forgotten trails of men the silent trails to empty mines. Against the gray sky stands a monstrous cat its mouth hanging loose, a few boney trees dangling from its jaws. (Someone said it can take a 125 cubic yard bite . . . that’s half a mountain.) Downstream from Decatur’s Woods everything is dead or dying. The cat hunches over the countryside, over the laurel and dogwood and mayapple and even the blackbird flees the preying cat, deserts the land of acid water and bitter despair. 780 The Kentucky Anthology Half the mountain is gone and more than half the people. Lord, you think we got nine lives? ...